Still Crazy After All These Years
There’s been an alarming growth of conspiracy theories, often antisemitic ones, to explain extreme weather events.
Was a powerful political conspiracy behind Hurricane Helene? You might think that no one would believe anything that crazy. You would be wrong. This post by a conspiracist about Hurricane Helene got 11 million views: “Don’t worry guys, weather modification isn’t real! It’s just a coincidence that Hurricane Helene is one of the most devastating ‘inland damage storms’ in history and that hundreds of pro-Trump counties are being massively impacted during the most important election of our lifetimes.” Or as a video reposted by former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn said ““Hurricane Helene was an ATTACK caused by Weather Manipulation.”
Then there’s Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, of “Jewish space laser” fame. She delivered the same message but in two stages: first with a map showing the GOP leanings of the affected areas, followed later by a post saying “they absolutely can control the weather.” (We’ll get to who “they” might be later.) This zany idea didn’t impair Greene’s political standing. Within hours of floating her Helene conspiracy theory she was praised by her party’s Vice-Presidential candidate as a “great, strong, woman leader” and “a hell of a Congresswoman.” She then doubled-down on her theories by posting a decade-old CBS story about rainmaking efforts using lasers. And as a follow up, with Hurricane Milton on the horizon, she added that ““Climate change is the new Covid.” .She continued, “Ask your government if the weather is manipulated or controlled. Did you ever give permission to them to do it? Are you paying for it? Of course you are.”
There’s also a widespread rumor that Helene was created to clear land for lithium mining. I couldn’t blame you for thinking that I made that up, but the truth is that I’m just not that creative. Here’s a full quote so you can see for yourself:
“As the United States government and its buddies in the central banking corporate crime syndicates stand to make billions and trillions of dollars off of these lithium deposits that are underneath towns underneath homes, underneath schools, and they can’t get access unless the land is somehow completely cleaned off and available for mining, what better way to do that than by washing away the people who live there and all that they own, and blaming it on climate change?”
I hope you didn’t miss the reference to the “central banking corporate crime syndicates,” which shows how one conspiracy theory can build on the other. And of course, theories about banking conspiracies have a long history, usually connected with attacks on a specific ethnic group. When Marjorie Taylor Greene said that the Maui fire was started by a space laser, she was quick to hint at Rothschild involvement.
Also reminiscent of Rep. Greene’s space laser theory, the most prominent explanation for how the government controls hurricanes involves a university project in Alaska, where researchers are using radio waves to research the ionosphere. Here’s what the the “New World Order” and the University of Alaska are supposedly conniving at: “Where it concerns the formation, intensification and direction of weaponized Hurricane Helene, the NWO geoterrorists have again used their highly advanced geoengineering technologies. . . “ In case you’re interested, the people behind the New World Order theory are often thought to be the same ethnic group connected with Marjorie Taylor Greene’s space laser and the “international banking conspiracy.”
That reference to geoengineering dovetails into another emerging set of conspiracy theories – only in this, the result may be actual legislation. In fact, Tennessee recently passed a law banning geoengineering on the initiative of believers in the chemtrail conspiracy theory. That’s the idea that someone is adding chemicals to the exhaust of jet planes for some nefarious purpose, often weather-related. Efforts to ban geoengineering seem to have originated with a woman who felt that “condensation trails behind airplanes seemed thicker than she remembered as a child” and that she was unable “to see meteor showers that she said were once clearly visible.” The amount of evidence to support the chemtrail theory is zero – but if you’re a conspiracy theorist, the complete absence of evidence is itself an irrefutable sign of a powerful conspiracy hiding the truth.
Anti-vaxxers also love this theory – if “they” can secretly inject bad stuff in your arm, I guess it’s only a small step to imagine they’re doing the same thing to the atmosphere. RFK Jr., once an environmentalist liberal but now an anti-vaxxer Trump supporter, has been friendly to this idea. I can’t really improve on the NY Times’s account:
“During an episode of his podcast last year called ‘Are Chemtrails Real?,’ Mr. Kennedy said the issue of climate change had been ‘hijacked’ by the World Economic Forum and Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
“‘They’re doing the same thing to us that the pharmaceutical industry does, which is they aggravate the problem, and then sell us the solution,’ Mr. Kennedy said. ‘And of course the solution that they want for climate are more social controls, and then the big solution of geoengineering projects — which of course Bill Gates is funding all over the world.’”
The thing about conspiracy theories is that they start out sounding like a joke but end in tears, when the true believers decide it’s time to act. Who could have actually believed that the Democratic leadership was running a pedophile ring in the basement of a pizza parlor? Pretty funny until a guy with a gun decided to do something about it. None of which has prevented PizzaGate from finding new life on TikTok.
The NY Times reports that the weather-based conspiracy theories, spurred on by a flood of posts on X, are also bearing dangerous fruit. According to the Washington Post, “top officials in North Carolina and at the Federal Emergency Management Agency responding to Helene are being subjected to a flurry of antisemitic attacks, causing some of them to fear for their safety as they prepare for another hurricane to strike Florida.”
An old saying tells us that “the sleep of reason produces monsters.” I fear that’s what we’re beginning to see.
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About Dan
Dan Farber has written and taught on environmental and constitutional law as well as about contracts, jurisprudence and legislation. Currently at Berkeley Law, he has al…
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Anti-government conspiracy thinking is deep in America’s cultural DNA–and, like DNA, unobservable without special effort.
The American Revolution was a reaction to a government power that really did conspire against its people. The revolution was successful, and its most conspicuous tool was violence.
That’s a very unambiguous origin story, and a model for present action in the minds of MAGA World. It’s mythic, for both men and women. Just look at the flags flying over Supreme Court Justice Alito’s (wife’s) house.
Our collective imagination is also trapped in the related idea of “freedom,” despite that the freedom sought in 1776 was limited to white, landholding males. The movement for female and racial equality is an ongoing challenge to white male primacy.
Trump intuits this. He stokes cognitive dissonance around gender roles (hi, Justice Alito) and then, like a TV ad, offers to resolve it. How? By re-conforming society to ancient, pre-conscious myths of white male primacy and justice by the sword.
MTG’s quote illustrates the dynamic. She questions whether America consented to a society-shaping government action. But she doesn’t question whether we consented to a society-shaping private action–say, the imposition of social media on us all, which has given the conspiracy-minded the power to bypass both reason and the deliberative process and burrow instantly into millions of brain stems in a single go.
(My conspiracy theory: It’s not a coincidence that Elon Musk controls X (Twitter) and is surrounding the globe with telecommunications satellites.)
The US government is the obvious and natural scapegoat for all the rage against the unseen and unassailable cultural, historic, technological, and economic forces that fill so many with irresolvable anxiety.
We’re in a battle with our own mythology and those who would use it for their own ends. Our 18th century mindset, of which democracy is perhaps the most salient product, is creaking under 21st century forces.